Inspirations - The Three Doctors

The Three Doctors was written by Bob Baker and Dave Martin, their third script for the series. The season beginning on 30th December 1972 would be the 10th, so Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks felt that this anniversary should be marked in some way. The actual 10th anniversary - on 23rd November, 1973 - would actually fall in the gap between the 10th and 11th seasons, and the real anniversary story was envisaged as an attempt to equal the longest Doctor Who story ever - the 12 part The Daleks' Master Plan. The director of that epic, Douglas Camfield, had a few words of advice about that. Meanwhile, Letts and Dicks looked for an attention-grabbing season opener. Season 8 had introduced the Master and new companion Jo Grant, and Season 9 had seen the return of the Daleks after an absence of several years.
The production office had often received letters from viewers suggesting a story which united all the three Doctors. These suggestions were always dismissed off-hand. Wanting their attention-grabber, Letts and Dicks decided to think about what such a story might look like, and they realised that it was not such a bad idea after all.
Patrick Troughton was sounded out about returning to the role he had quit in 1969. An old friend of Letts and Dicks, he felt that enough time had passed since his departure, and it hadn't harmed his career as he had earlier feared, so he was on board in principle. A phone call to William Hartnell found the first ever Doctor only too happy to reprise the role.

Baker and Martin were then commissioned to write a story in which all three Doctors would be required to defeat a powerful enemy. The reward for succeeding would be the lifting of the Doctor's exile on Earth, so the Time Lords had to feature. As plans proceeded two hurdles appeared. The first was that Troughton was extremely busy, and would not be available towards the beginning of production on the 10th Season. The story would need to be made much later, leaving very little time between production and broadcast. The second cause for concern was a phone call Letts received from Hartnell's wife, Heather, alarmed that he had agreed to return to the programme. She explained that Letts must have caught him on one of his rare good days. He was very ill, and most of the time he had poor memory and could be very thought disordered. She expressed her concern that he might not be able to appear. This was then fed back to the writers, who were asked to reduce the role of the First Doctor, and Dicks would further reduce his contribution to little more than a cameo.

What Baker and Martin came up with was a story entitled "Deathworld". This would see the Time Lords threatened by a Federation of Evil, led by a personification of Death. Death's Federation would include zombies and evil mythical beings such as the Goddess Kali and Polyphemus the Cyclops. The three Doctors would be sent by the Time Lords into a sort of limbo world, whose entrance was in a graveyard. The First and Second Doctors would sacrifice themselves so that the current incarnation could succeed. One image the writers had was of the Death figure playing chess, based on the 1957 Ingmar Bergman film The Seventh Seal, in which Death plays chess with a knight. The writers called their Death character OHM - the word WHO inverted. This was to suggest that he was equal but opposite to the Doctor. Barry Letts vetoed this - as he pointed out that the Doctor isn't actually called "Who". Letts also disliked the notion of the limbo world. Baker and Martin went back to the drawing board and came up with a storyline called "The Black Hole". This would feature a similar character to OHM, to be called Omega, who was another Time Lord. They had been reading about Black Holes in scientific literature, as well as theories about anti-matter. The new plot would have Omega draining the power of the Time Lords in revenge for them having abandoned him. One of their inspirations was the 1939 MGM musical version of The Wizard of Oz. The rainbow became the time-bridge whilst Omega was the wizard-like character, creating things by sheer force of will. Like the Wizard, Omega would not be all that he appeared, though in his case he is just force of will - his body having atrophied away to nothing.

Hartnell's involvement was still a worry. It was decided that he would be employed for a single day's filming, to be undertaken at Ealing Studios. The plot had the First Doctor trapped in a time eddy, and only able to comment and advise on events from the TARDIS scanner or the Time Lords' view screen. A small piece of filming took place at Hartnell's Kent cottage - shots of him strolling in his garden, which would be viewed by the Time Lords. On this day Pertwee and Troughton joined him for publicity photographs. The iconic images of the trio, one of which was used for the cover of the Radio Times, were taken in a makeshift studio set up in Hartnell's garage. For many years, fan myth had it that all of Hartnell's scenes were filmed in his garage, but this was not the case. Seated in a perspex pyramid at Ealing, Hartnell could read his lines off of cue cards. This was to prove his last acting job, and he died in 1975 during the broadcast of Tom Baker's first season.
It had been hoped that Frazer Hines would reprise the role of Jamie, and would be given a romantic sub-plot with Jo. However, Hines was working on Emmerdale Farm at the time and he was denied permission to take the necessary time out. It was still hoped that he might feature in a very brief cameo at the end, as he questioned where his Doctor has been. Much of what would have been given to Hines was redistributed to John Levene - giving Benton a more prominent role. Benton was originally going to be left behind on Earth when UNIT HQ vanished. With Hines unavailable, Wendy Padbury was considered for a return appearance as Zoe. However, Pertwee then put his foot down.
Insecure at the best of times, and unsure about sharing the screen with his predecessor, he vetoed any further inclusion by characters from before his time as he thought they would detract from the current line-up. This was his and Katy Manning's show now.

Another fan myth for many years was that the B&W sequence of Troughton walking through a misty environment, as viewed by the Time Lords, was a clip taken from The Macra Terror. Of course, it was specially shot as part of the location filming for this story - in the quarry used to represent Omega's world.
The choice of Clyde Pollitt to play one of the Time Lords was a deliberate one on Letts' part. He wanted this to be the same Time Lord who had officiated at the Doctor's trial in The War Games, as this story would see the Doctor's exile, handed down in that story, lifted. This is why Graham Leaman was also cast as a Time Lord - it was intended that he was the same one who had been seen at the start of Colony In Space.
Omega's servants were never properly named on screen. They are usually called Gell Guards, as when they appeared as part of the 1977 Weetabix Doctor Who promotion. The production team were not best pleased when they elicited howls of laughter when first brought on location.
There was some tension in the studio when Pertwee and Troughton had to perform together. Pertwee liked to learn his lines exactly as written, whilst Troughton preferred to extemporise a little - saying the gist of the line rather than as it appeared in the script. This could throw Pertwee and make him irritable.
We get a new TARDIS console room, after the last story had introduced a new set. This new one is much closer in design to the original. Barry Letts had hated the one designed for The Time Monster, and was not unduly upset when it was found to have become damaged in storage.

This story marks the first time that someones says of the TARDIS that it is "bigger on the inside" - when the Third Doctor tells Benton that this is what he expects him to say. It is clear that this is the first time that Benton and the Brigadier have seen the inside of the ship - which is surprising.
The performances of the Second Doctor and of the Brigadier have been singled out for comment by fans. It is felt that Troughton does not act like any of his performances whilst he was leading the show. He becomes a sort of caricature of the Second Doctor - which we will see in his other two return performances, and which was the persona he adopted for convention appearances. The Brigadier, meanwhile, seems to be played more for laughs, and comes across as more dim-witted. His line "I'm pretty sure that's Cromer" was an ad-lib by Nicholas Courtney. Three of the Brigadier's most famous lines would turn out to be ad-libs.
Studio recording ended just two and a half weeks before the first episode was broadcast. For the first time, the end credits feature a BBC copyright with the year. For the first episode, this read 1973, despite Part One going to air on the penultimate day of 1972.
Next time: the Doctor and Jo are free to travel anywhere in Time and Space, but end up sharing a cargo hold with some chickens. Then a dinosaur shows up. Meanwhile, a pair of entertainers are having some trouble getting through customs at an alien space port. What could the connection possibly be...?